I was born in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, moved to Scarborough, Ontario as a youngster, was educated and worked in southern Ontario, and returned to the east coast to work in Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador at the Grenfell campus of Memorial University. Currently, I reside in Sackville, New Brunswick and work at Mount Allison University. I enjoy travelling across Canada and hope to add the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut to my repertoire over the coming years.

I admit, I never set out to be an academic. It was definitely not on my radar and I just had too much to “do”.

After high school, I trained at the Niagara Parks Commission School of Horticulture but left the program early with a classmate, Marilyn who has become my life partner, to co-found our horticultural business, Cox-Levesque: Landscape Specialists. It had a landscape division which specialized in natural stonework and alternative landscapes and a 3-acre greenhouse division that specialized in growing perennials and groundcovers for the wholesale market.

For years, we loved our work, but we realized we needed to greatly expand the business to better meet market demands. About 20 years in, that’s when we asked ourselves, “Is this what we want to be doing for the next 25 years?” “What alternatives could we be doing?” We chose to change careers and eventually moved to Newfoundland and Labrador as I assumed a position at Grenfell (MUN).

How did this happen?

You see, I have always been curious about things, especially Canadian political events. When I was in high school, Quebec was facing its existential crisis in trying to decide whether to separate from Canada or not. I still recall the epic battles between Quebec Premier René Lévesque (no relation) and Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the first Quebec referendum vote in 1980, and the battles over patriation of our constitution. High times indeed in Canadian politics and this is what got me interested in things – wow! Growing up in this era was phenomenal and in today’s lingo, talk about experiential education!

As we started our business, our clients included many rural people. I became fascinated with “big agriculture” and went back to school (part-time) to learn more. That’s how I ended up at Centralia College of Agricultural Technology and obtained a Diploma in Agricultural Business Management. I became interested in agricultural economics, supply management to be precise (a key topic today in trade talks with the USA), and once done my diploma, I enrolled at the University of Western Ontario.

At Western, I enrolled in economics courses. To take economics courses, one must take calculus courses too and I quickly learned that calculus and I were not meant to be. So, I switched to political science and renewed my interest in politics. Over the next 10 years, I completed my undergraduate degree (2003) while working full-time in our business. That was challenging!

Marilyn encouraged me to pursue a Master’s degree which I completed in 2004. The timing was right as throughout our business years I had served in various volunteer positions with the Landscape Ontario Horticultural Trades Association, the business association for the horticultural sector in Ontario. I was puzzled with how we, the industry, could work with government at times to get key changes made such as related to the apprenticeship program and workplace health and safety yet at other times, our efforts were futile such as with pesticides policies.

The question for me was, why?

This is where politics comes in and why I pursued a Master’s degree. I wanted to peer into the black box of government decision-making. My major research paper for my Masters explored voluntary approaches to environmental performance under the supervision of Dr. Gordon McBean. This work was a natural outgrowth of my environmental background.

I loved my MA studies but the more I learned, the more questions I had.

At Marilyn’s suggestion, I applied to PhD programs. I was intrigued for sure but doing a PhD did not seem feasible and risky. Boy, was I surprised when I got into all programs I applied to and with very healthy funding packages. It was surreal. They wanted to pay me to read books and journal articles and write papers?! Why not!

So, off to McMaster University I went to obtain my PhD in Comparative Public Policy and Public Administration under the supervision of Dr. Mark Sproule-Jones. My thesis, called Unravelling Nested Institutional Arrangements, compared groundwater management regimes for the Ogallala aquifer (US Midwest) to that for the Great Lakes basin. I examined linkages between actors, institutional configurations, and policy outcomes over a 40 period for each region to develop a framework for pursuing policy changes under different conditions of uncertainty. Post-PhD, I returned to Western as a Post-Doctoral Fellow under the supervision of Dr. Robert A. Young.

Graduate studies impacted our business. We terminated the landscape division, but Marilyn kept the greenhouses for which I worked part-time throughout my graduate studies. By 2010, after 25 years, we shut down the business for our move to Newfoundland and Labrador where I took a position at the Environmental Policy Institute. Two years later, I joined the Department of Politics and International Relations at Mount Allison University, where I work to this day.

Did I have a plan to be an academic? No. But, I was curious and followed my passions. And, yes, I had and continue to have a very supportive partner in life, Marilyn. Without her, I would not be where or who I am today – an accidental academic!